The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) invites vendors and stakeholders to review and provide feedback on draft electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) specifications that include logic and header changes for eCQMs under consideration for CMS quality reporting and payment programs.

This opportunity will allow CMS to learn from Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendors who have the technical capabilities to review the draft measures in the Clinical Quality Language (CQL) standard for logic expression and test the Health Quality Measures Format (HQMF) code by directly consuming machine readable XML files for eCQMs. Testing will help CMS to identify instances in which the XML code produces errors so that issues can be resolved prior to posting the fully specified measures in spring 2020. The draft measures in HTML, XML, and JSON formats are available February 24, 2020 through March 6, 2020, on the ONC Project Tracking System (Jira) eCQM Issue Tracker via the following tickets:

• CQM-3905: Annual Update for the 2021 Reporting Period: Draft Preview of Eligible Hospital and Critical Access Hospital eCQMs
• CQM-3904: Annual Update for the 2021 Performance Period: Draft Preview of Eligible Professional and Eligible Clinician eCQMs

Updating eCQMs for 2021 Reporting/Performance Periods

CMS is updating Eligible Hospital/Critical Access Hospital and Eligible Professional/Eligible Clinician eCQMs for potential inclusion in the following programs:

• Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting (IQR) Program;
• Medicare Promoting Interoperability Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs for Eligible Hospitals and Critical Access Hospitals;
• Medicaid Promoting Interoperability Program for Eligible Hospitals and Critical Access Hospitals;
• Medicaid Promoting Interoperability Program for Eligible Professionals;
• Quality Payment Program (QPP): The Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and Advanced Alternative Payment Models (Advanced APMs); and
• Advanced APM: Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+).

The updated eCQMs will be available on the eCQI Resource Center in spring 2020. The measures will be expressed using CQL logic and will continue to use the Quality Data Model (QDM) as the conceptual model to express clinical concepts contained within quality measures. Refer to the QDM v5.5 and current version of the CQL standard to better understand how they work together to provide eCQMs that are human readable, yet structured for electronic processing. Measures will not be eligible for 2021 reporting unless and until they are proposed and finalized through notice-and-comment rulemaking for each applicable program.

For More Information

To find out more about eCQMs and CQL, visit the eCQI Resource Center.